Saturday, 12 December 2015

THE CLASS OF '61

Going to watch Boro play in a pre-season friendly at Brunton Park in August 2005 you could still smell the damp from that January's flooding as you walked down Warwick Road. That it should happen again is immeasurably cruel.

On a happier note, I've a piece about South Bank and the Ellis Cup in the latest issue of The Blizzard. There's lots of other good stuff in there, including a great article by Gunnar Persson about tragic Swedish genius Nacka Skoglund.

(Nacka on the left, Knacker on the right)

Oh, and there's a piece about Tasmania Berlin the worst team in Bundesliga history, too. You can order/download a copy here: https://www.theblizzard.co.uk/

Finally catching up on that Class of '92 documentary reminded me of this, written for WSC a decade back.

When they reach their forties, men experience a change. You begin to suspect that the manufacturers of jeans have started skimping on material, you meet young people (yes, you have started to use the phrase “young people”) that you assume are sixth-formers and when you ask politely what A-levels they are doing discover that in fact they are GPs, barristers or your new boss, and you feel strangely compelled to tell your children not to keep saying like, like all the, like, time, for goodness sake because “you’re hardly going to impress a prospective employer speaking like that”.

Worst of all, though, is the dawning realisation that you can no longer lie in bed and daydream about being a professional footballer. Because even a fantasy must have a tenuous thread attaching it to reality and, once you leave your thirties, the scoring-a-hat-trick-in-the-Cup-final thread has snapped with a reverberating twang.

You still daydream about football, of course, but the nature of the daydream changes. Where once you were spotted in the back garden dribbling effortlessly round toddlers and dogs and catapulted to fame and glory, now you write series of international best-sellers/invent a water-powered car/win the lottery four times in the same month and use the money to buy your football club. You are a model chairman. You implement all sorts of radical measures: investing equally in local young talent and top names from around the globe who “will excite the fans”, forging links with the local community, allowing kids in free for FA Cup ties, abolishing post-goal music and banishing sponsors’ names from the old-style cotton shirts the design of which remains unchanged for at least a decade.

You are a hands-off chairman – of course you are – but just every so often you pop into the dressing room and modestly offer an incisive and rather brilliant piece of tactical advice that turns the Champions League semi-final decisively in your favour (though naturally you refuse to take any credit for it despite a clamour in the media for you to take the England job). Soon the stadium rings with chants of praise featuring your name, while Match of the Day cameras catch you blushing humbly amid a throng of former players and adoring blondes. You are praised by Andrew Jennings and denounced by Sepp Blatter. One of the most important milestones in a man’s life is when he stops wanting to be the new Pelé and starts wishing he was the new Jack Walker.

That, at least, was what it used to be like. No longer. Because one of the most brutally damaging effects of the recent emergence of Premier League clubs as a rich man’s plaything, one that has not so far been touched on in the press, is the effect it has had on the fantasy chairmen of England. The influx of oligarchs and oil barons has, quite simply, pushed the price of even a moderate football club way outside the reach of even the most vivid imagination.

The news that Newcastle United would be beyond the pocket of JK Rowling was the final straw for me. £450 million? How do you dream up that kind of sum? Age has ended my fantasy of a World Cup winner’s medal and now cold, hard cash has spat in the eye of the one that replaced it. My grandad always assured me that money would ruin football. Little did I suspect that it would not only spoil the real game, it would destroy the made-up game as well.

Some may feel that the obvious solution is to daydream about buying a lower-division or non-League club instead. At first that may appear attractive. But taking a grassroots small-town club and leading them all the way up from the Conference North to the UEFA Cup is perilous. I have explored it recently and to be honest it never ends well. Your club’s new wealth breeds simmering resentment among others of similar stature, the hardcore fans are quickly alienated and replaced by glory seekers. You see yourself as a philanthropic bene­factor bringing joy to a depressed corner of the north. Others see you as an opportunistic sugar daddy who has undermined fair competition. There is much talk of Gretna and Rushden & Diamonds. It is not much fun having a fantasy that is filled with visiting fans chanting: “Where were you when you were shit?”

Of course you could take over the non-League club and not shower it with your imagined riches, building it up slowly through night after night after night of hard work, endeavour and prudent financial management. But, be honest, where is the fantasy in that?

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.